Fish Out of Water (3 page)

It made Ellery feel like he had in school. Exceptionally singular, unexceptionally alone.

“He don’t know and he wouldn’t care if the problem didn’t end up on his lap,” Jade snarled, making Ellery wince. Well, he’d always thought she harbored sort of a dislike for him, and she certainly wasn’t bothering to hide it now. “Are you
sure
this is the guy we want?”

Jackson’s gaze raked Ellery up and down, and Ellery had to remind himself that Jackson was a
PI—
he had no say in how the firm was run or who got which cases. Leonard Pfeist might think he walked on water, but there were three other partners who had a say in things, and Ellery was in good standing with all of them too.

“He’s not afraid of the cops,” Jackson said, pinning Ellery hard
with a green-eyed glare. “Everyone else worked at the DA’s for a few years—they’ve got ties. This guy doesn’t give a fuck about anything but winning.”

“Yeah, for
himself
.”

Jackson’s shrug rankled. He apparently thought that was fair.

“J, does it matter why he wants to win as long as he wins for K?”

“Yeah,” she muttered. “Unless he thinks it’s better to cut and run. He’d better not bail on my brother—he needs us, Jacky!”

Jackson’s jaw tightened and his glare intensified. Ellery’s hands were sweating, and he hated himself desperately
for wanting this man’s approval. He drew himself to his full six foot two and pulled his lips back in disdain. “Whatever your little family matter is,” he sneered, “I’m sure you can deal without me. What makes you think I even
want
this case?”

Jackson snorted and rolled his eyes. “Don’t stress yourself, Pinstripes. If you’ve got the guts for it, you’re going to want it. No self-respecting shark would turn this one down.”

“Let me be the judge of that. Do I even get an explanation?”

“I’ll tell you on the way to the jail.”

ELLERY’S FAMILY
considered themselves liberal, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t have pressed the locks on their doors for reassurance if a man who looked like Kaden Cameron had approached their car.

Easily six foot five with skin of darkest brown and a head shaved bald, Kaden dominated the small bare conference room of the county jail. The bandage taped behind his ear didn’t make him look the slightest bit vulnerable either. He had craggy, ageless features, a scowl that could shake mountains, and shoulders that looked like they wouldn’t fit through a door. He appeared to be every inch a badass, from his Lakers sweatshirt to his black Converse, but his file told another story.

That didn’t mean Ellery’s hand didn’t shake as he took a quick sip of water and set his cup back down on the plain steel table.

“So you can put your house down for collateral,” he said, because the first order of business was
always
making bail.

“My house,” Jackson said promptly. “Not his. It’s a duplex. I have a renter on the other side—”

“That racist asshole still live next door?” Kaden interrupted, but the look Jackson shot him wasn’t annoyed.

“He’s not racist, K, just old.”

“Yeah, he’s an old
racist
,” Kaden grumbled. “Seriously, Jacky, did you
hear
him arguing against Kobe Bryant being one of the greatest ever?”

“It was at my house over Thanksgiving, dumbass,” Jackson said, rolling his eyes. “You two had to be threatened with a potato gun—and your own wife did the threatening. You remember that?”

Kaden flashed a nostalgic smile. “Heh. Yeah. Rhonda was
pissed
.”

“She should have been. You were all up in his face when he was trying hard to be your friend. He was playing with your children—he won’t even talk to his
own
kids. Just because he doesn’t like your pick of basketball players doesn’t make him a racist. And you have a
daughter
, K—do you really want Kobe Bryant to be a hero? Mike’s a good guy.”

“He’s not going to be so good when he gets evicted because you gambled his home on me,” Kaden said, and Ellery made a quick reassessment.

He’d assumed that Kaden had gotten distracted because—like a lot of Ellery’s clients—he was in denial of how much trouble he was in, but that wasn’t the case at all.

“Not a gamble, K, ’cause you’re not going to run. And you know what? Even if you
did
run, I’d rather get an apartment than know Rhonda and the kids were out on the street.”

The man who looked Jackson Rivers in the eyes was obviously capable of meeting reality. “They’re going to be on the street anyway,” he said. “If I can’t work during this bullshit, we can’t make payments.”

Ellery didn’t blurt out “Pro bono?”—but he wanted to. He must have made some sort of noise, though, because Jackson sent him a glare that was probably meant to shrivel Ellery’s manhood, root, stalk, and berries. Ha! Little did the man know he put on Kevlar undershorts in the morning.

Figuratively, of course.

“Your sister’s moving in,” Jackson said, pulling Ellery back from the shoring up of his self-esteem. “She’ll help Rhonda with the payments until you can. Don’t worry, K, your people gotchu.” Jackson glanced back at Ellery. “You got anything else to say?” he demanded.

Ellery glared at him. “You know I do. The bail hearing is tomorrow, first thing in the morning. I need something to give the judge besides just who’s going to help with the payments.”

“I’m not going to run,” Kaden said. “I’ve got a wife and two kids and a fuckin’ dog who thinks I invented the morning crap. I own a house and part of a business. I’ve lived my whole life in this city. I’m not a flight risk, and I didn’t kill no fucking cop!”

Ellery sucked air in through his teeth and looked at the anemic file, which featured the single crime-scene photo. That alone was weird, because there shouldn’t have been a photo in the file at this juncture anyway. Even if he normally
did
have photos at this point, the fact that there
was
only one bothered the crap out of Ellery. Jesus, a hundred CSIs in Sacramento, and they get one lousy photo and some even blurrier pics of fingerprints? Something horribly wrong was going on here.

But the image bothered him more than the lack of evidence. The image was of Kaden slouched down against the counter of the gas station franchise he owned a piece of. His eyes were closed, and a trickle of blood leaked from under the black stocking cap he’d been wearing.

A SIG Sauer P229 handgun lay near his outstretched hand, pointed in the direction of the police officer who lay sprawled dead with a hole the size of Texas in his chest. A blood pool spread luridly over the floor.

“Now see,” Ellery said delicately, “we may be able to get you out on bail, but I think it’s that last part that we’re going to have trouble with.”

When he looked up from the brief, it was not Kaden’s hard look of resignation that punched him with the most grit. No—it was Jackson Rivers’s blistering look of accusatory fury that made him think that Kevlar undies just weren’t going to be enough.

“I think maybe you need to tell me what happened,” he said deliberately. “And don’t leave anything out.”

Kaden Cameron met his gaze straight on, and Ellery wasn’t imagining the hostility there. “There isn’t much to leave out,” he said, voice flat. “Because I don’t remember
crap
.”

Yeah. And if that was true, that was going to make things
so
much more difficult.

“Well.” Ellery resisted the urge to shove his chair back and fidget. “This is going to be a real short meeting.”

From the twin looks of disgust he got, he figured that was the wrong thing to say.

TWO HOURS
later he wished he could take it back. It wasn’t a short meeting, but what it lacked in brevity, it made up in supremely painful frustration.

He’d given into impulse during the first hour and had stood up to pace. In the middle of the second hour, he’d taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. Jackson, who normally wore jeans and a sport coat, had shed his sport coat and—to Ellery’s mortification—toed off his dress shoes.

Kaden had given him a ration of crap about it too—the first
non
business thing he’d said since he’d started to tell the sketchy, thin story that was making Ellery grind his teeth.

“I’m trusting you with my life, son, and you can’t even keep your shoes on for me?”

“Not for you, not for your sister—”

“You’d keep them on for Rhonda,” Kaden joked weakly.

Jackson rubbed Kaden’s bald head. “I respect Rhonda. I saw you throw up in the fifth grade. The mystery’s gone.”

Kaden yawned and stretched then, and he probably would have tried to stand up, but his ankles were cuffed to a ring in the floor. “Yeah, well, that would bother me more if I was looking for a blow job, but since I’m all straight, I think I’ll live.”

“You are all talk. Fact is, you never moved on me ’cause I was dating your sister and, you know, awkward.”

“Yeah, Jacky. That’s it. That’s why I never changed teams.”

Jackson smiled fondly at him and then met Ellery’s eyes. “Is there any way we can let him stand? His knees have got to be killing him.”

Kaden’s grunt told them both that was the truth.

“Yeah, sure,” Ellery heard himself saying. Normally, no. Not with the violence he’d seen in the picture at the beginning. But for two hours he’d grilled Kaden Cameron on the events of August 12, and all Kaden had admitted to was stealing a Red Bull from his own store.

He’d been pissed during the interview, yeah. But Ellery couldn’t blame him.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and he summoned the guard outside the door to come in and unlock Kaden’s chains, citing physical discomfort. When the guard had left—after taking the ankle chain out of the loop but leaving Kaden’s ankles with a minimum amount of play between them—Ellery sat back down and nodded at him. “Okay, Mr. Cameron. You walk and stretch, I’ll sit and talk. I’m going to summarize this as I understand it, and if you think I’ve gotten anything wrong, you need to stop me as I’m talking, because otherwise that’s the story I’m building your case on, do you understand?”

“Got it,” Kaden said, pushing heavily to his feet.

“So, at eleven o’clock you were working behind the window at your gas station—now is that a time you usually work?”

“No,” Kaden said, pausing as he clasped his hands in front of him and, with a clank of chains, lifted to work out his shoulders. “I’m usually out of there at nine, but our night guy—”

“Connie Coulson—that’s the guy?”

“Short for Conrad, yeah. Anyway, Connie, he calls up in the last five minutes of my shift and says he can’t make it. Doesn’t say why, and I’m like—”

Ellery consulted with the notes and moved his lips in time to what Kaden would say next.

“
Fuuuuck
.” Kaden and Jackson met eyes then, probably in understanding of Kaden’s wife, Rhonda. She didn’t seem to be the type who would take her husband’s overtime away from the family in stride.

“Okay, I’ve got that,” Ellery continued. “So he called and you stayed.” He frowned. “Were you going to stay the entire night?”

Kaden shook his head. “Naw—I mean, we would have lost some sales, but there’s no law that says a gas station has to be open all night. I was gonna put a Closed for the Night sign out, and Denny—”

“That’s your partner—”

“Yeah. He would have opened up in the morning.”

“Okay, so you were working the counter at around 11:00 p.m. when two policemen entered.”

Kaden nodded. “Yeah.”

“Officer C. Miles and Officer S. Bridger. Right?”

Kaden’s shrug was sort of awful, considering the dead rookie and his own uncertain fate. “I don’t know their names. They came in and I was drinking my Red Bull, right? ’Cause I’d hit
the wall
, you feel me?”

“I feel you,” Ellery said with reluctant sympathy. He remembered studying for the bar exam between jobs. “You needed to stay awake.”

“You know it. And one of the cops, the younger one, walked in front of the counter. I turned to look at him and he started talking to me about a call they’d gotten.”

“They said you’d reported a robbery.” Ellery knew this detail, but he wanted to see if Kaden stayed consistent.

“But I hadn’t,” Kaden insisted. “Man, I probably wouldn’t have reported a robbery if there’d
been
a robbery. Everybody knows the cops out there are dirty.”

Ellery had been circling things on his pad. Jackson had been pacing alongside Kaden, both of them radiating sympathetic nervous energy.

With Kaden’s offhanded declaration, all motion in the room stopped.

“K?” Jackson said tentatively.

“I’m sorry,” Ellery said through a suddenly dry throat, “could you repeat that?”

Kaden cast a tortured glare at Jackson. “They’re dirty, Jacky—they’ve been dirty since they got rid of you.”

Jackson swallowed. “But… you… you’ve gone to that gas station five times a week for six years. The cops were shaking you down during that time? You couldn’t have told—”

Kaden shook his head. “Jacky… I didn’t want… man.” Kaden’s voice broke a little. “Me and J and Rhonda—we watched you
die
. Twice. They almost didn’t bring you back. The room looked like a slaughterhouse. And you still got the scars. You’re gonna have them for fucking ever. And we knew—and even if they didn’t kill
you
, Jacky, they’d kill me, or Rhonda. So I didn’t call the cops. I wouldn’t have called them in. And there I was, watching the blond one—the young one, looked like you when you were a kid, but with whiter hair and a softer chin. He was talking to me, sounding so fucking sincere asking me about the robbery, and why would they have gotten a call if I hadn’t reported it—it was like listening to a corrupt puppy. And my mouth was dry—I swear, my mouth was dry, because…
dirty cops
. In
my gas station
,
and it was eleven at night. I took another swig of my drink, and….”

Kaden’s pacing of the small room had brought him back to the table. All of the anger, the nervous energy that seemed to have driven him, just drained out like water, and he collapsed onto the chair, his body heavy enough to make it squeak in protest.